fixpafandomcom-20200216-history
Exporting American Education
Media NY Times from August, 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/world/asia/07indo.html?pagewanted=1 Lively lessons, engaged teachers and interested parents can promote tolerance and counteract extreme Islamic views, the Bush administration has made promoting education a focus of assistance to friendly Muslim countries through the United States Agency for International Development. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Iraq have all received increased American funds in the last several years for building schools and training teachers and administrators. Indonesia, a moderate Muslim country, was added to the list, American officials said, because of concerns about a growing streak of fundamentalism among graduates of privately run Islamic religious schools, known as pesantren. The effort in Indonesia is different from that in the other countries, American officials said. The money is spent chiefly on training, not bricks and mortar, believing that encouraging good teaching strikes at a more fundamental issue. Nearly $9 million has been set aside for creating a version of “Sesame Street” with Indonesian characters and situations. It is scheduled to make its debut next year. President Bush personally announced the $157 million, five-year program during a visit to Bali in 2003. There was initial skepticism over whether the money would mean much in the country’s famously corrupt education bureaucracy. There was also some concern over the prospect of American meddling in the country’s schools. To discourage corruption, no money is provided directly to schools. At the outset, the very schools that the United States were most concerned about — the privately run religious schools that teach about 20 percent of the students — were declared off limits. The government also said that the Americans were not to change the curriculum. But the government has allowed the Americans to offer their training in state-run religious schools which receives funds from the Education Ministry as well as the Religious Affairs Department. ... The teachers, he said, had also acquired a greater variety of teaching skills by attending training courses. But teachers were motivated by better salaries, he said, made possible by an increase in national school financing. The extra money from the national government had allowed him to increase the lowest salaries from $15 a month to $30, which is still very low. Because of the parents’ low incomes, lesson materials were sparse at the madrasa, and it was difficult to pay the extra electricity bill to operate five computers daily for one-hour after-school classes. To organize the training of the Indonesian teachers, the United States hired a Washington consulting firm, Research Triangle Institute, which specializes in running American education programs abroad. The company hired an American with Indonesian experience to run the teacher training, and he in turn hired a small army of Indonesian educators in the provinces to conduct the training workshops. The training manuals deal with such basics as how to organize a classroom — in small friendly groups of tables rather than rows — to how to stimulate classroom discussion to how to study nature. ... The final test of whether the $157 million has been well invested, educators say, will be whether the new ideas endure. Once the five-year grant is spent, local educators are supposed to be familiar enough with the techniques to continue promoting them, but the outcome is still open to question. Mr. Syaiful, the madrasa principal, has been chosen by the American Embassy in Jakarta to visit the United States, as a reward for his good work. But with reviews of the participating schools not yet complete, there was no decision yet on whether the school would continue to get the teacher training next year. Links * Education